Smartphone Sensors Could Revolutionize Digital Magazines

We’ve all done those personality and health quizzes in magazines. You know, the ones where you suspect that answer A will categorize you as the personality type you’re trying to avoid, so you choose B instead.

Everyone does that, right?

These evasive strategies for magazine quizzes, though, could be a thing of the past as smartphones and tablet devices evolve to incorporate a variety of new sensors that will keep us honest. While they might not be able to assess your personality yet, sensors are rapidly becoming capable of detecting all kinds of information about you and your surroundings. These sensors will not only change digital magazines’ editorial content and advertising, but also lead to entirely new ways of authoring content and serving readers.

Location Services Have Room to Grow

Many consumers already use location-sensing tools, such as GPS features on smartphones, to find nearby businesses. Some magazine and media applications have also integrated location-based features that display relevant content for a user’s local area. But there’s a lot more that can be done with location information as sensors improve, and as media companies take fuller advantage of what they will offer.

Photo from Gesa Henselmans on Flickr.

Location-based services still have space to evolve, said Wayne Chavez, an operations manager for the sensor division of Freescale, a semiconductor company that is developing a variety of sensors for mobile devices, among other products. Chavez said improved location sensors and related applications will combine both GPS data and magnetometer readings to determine the device’s orientation and know which way the user is facing. That detail allows greater customization of information.

For example, imagine a tourist taking a picture of a notable building. The picture can easily be geo-tagged already with today’s GPS sensors, but new sensors and related applications could gather more information, including “what direction you took the picture from. It can tell you based on your previous interests and queries what’s around you near that building. You might be around the block from another historic building,” Chavez said.

Software on the device — such as, perhaps, a local magazine’s app — could then use the sensor’s data to push to the user details of how to navigate to that next location of potential interest, as well as ways “to read more about a historical marker, at any length, with instant access to that media,” Chavez said.

Magazines’ editorial content could even dynamically change to reflect more detailed location information. Joseph J. Esposito, an independent media consultant, offered an example of how it might work.

“If you’re reading a future edition of The New Yorker, maybe a story about a young couple that falls in love in New York, and you’re walking along, then the story changes because you just walked in front of a Mexican restaurant,” Esposito said. The story could update its content to harmonize with the reader’s location and activity.

While some digital magazines have already experimented with contextual advertising based on location data, Esposito said the use of this sensor information eventually “will start to have an editorial direction as well.”

Image by Miki Yoshihito on Flickr.

There’s room to improve contextual advertising based on location, too, for digital magazines and other media applications. Chavez suggests that location data could eventually be combined with information from “the cloud” — online compilations of user information — for more precise targeting.

“I see many providers saying, based on the location of your handset and your history, I can pre-filter and stream to you information that might be relevant to you,” he said.

Sensor Publishing

Esposito’s example of the dynamically updated New Yorker story, mentioned above, is just one way that sensor data might alter magazine content. As Esposito puts it, our phones are, in reality, sensors that we carry everywhere we go. Users of sensor-equipped mobile devices could serve as passive authors of projects that gather, analyze and present data from these sensors. Esposito calls this “sensor publishing“ to distinguish it from crowdsourcing because it doesn’t require participants’ active involvement.

Digital magazines and other media applications could collect sensor data — such as location, temperature, ambient light or other readings — and find ways to incorporate the data into stories, or to make them stories in themselves.

“We become carriers or hosts, collecting data passively all the time,” Esposito said. “It’s different from how we like to think about our phones, but there’s also passive use of the phone, when it picks up temperature or humidity. When you’re collecting information from 350 million phones, now it’s starting to get meaningful. Those little data aggregation points start to mean something.”

Esposito noted that all types of sensors — anything scientists use in laboratories, including spectroscopes or Geiger counters — could eventually be incorporated into mobile devices, making all kinds of data-gathering opportunities possible for the creation or enhancement of digital magazine content and other media.

Sensing Health Information

Sensors might also mean the end of cheating on magazines’ health quizzes, along with new ways of experiencing health-related content. A range of health sensors are already available and, as their cost falls, media companies could distribute them so that the data users gather about themselves as part of daily life could be integrated into various types of content.

Carré Technologies is a Montreal-based company developing health sensors that can be integrated into clothing. The sensors will interact with mobile devices to collect and analyze health information, and could have intriguing media-related uses.

“People in general are taking more responsibility for managing their own health,” said Pierre-Alexandre Fournier, president of Carré Technologies. “It’s going to help preventive health [care] … A lot of this monitoring can be done remotely now because of the Internet.”

Fournier said health sensors like his company’s are useful for a variety of fitness and health applications, such as games, biofeedback, and health observation.

“The sensors we make are meant to be worn 24/7, so there’s a huge amount of data created by just one person,” he said. “There are a lot of creative ways to show that data, to make it useful for the users.”

One way to experience that data might be to have it integrated with media content. For example, a digital magazine application that collected health data from a reader using these sensors could then offer customized diet or exercise recommendations within the context of the magazine, as well as pool data from users anonymously to produce sensor publishing projects. Articles could describe the activity patterns of the publication’s audience, contextualizing the individual reader’s activity level within that broader picture, and then offering suggestions for improvement.

This approach to providing personally relevant health information might be an opportunity for health-related magazines and other media seeking to capitalize on demographic trends in their mobile applications.

“One of the megatrends here is our aging population,” Chavez said. “As our baby boomers reach their mid-60s now, many of them are very tech aware, and looking for telehealth solutions, whether that’s out of personal interest or clinically driven.”

Naturally, there are privacy concerns related to the collection of health and other personal data. “I’m not sure how much people want the media company to have access to their physical data,” Fournier said. “Media companies already collect a lot of data on people. I’m not sure how far people will be able to go before they start to react.”

It seems inevitable, though, that we’ll see more integration of varied sensors into our mobile devices, and more creative applications for them in magazine and media applications, for both editorial content and advertising. What we’ve seen so far are just the earliest stages of sensors’ uses in the media world.

“We [just passed] the fourth anniversary of the iPhone, and it’s been transformative. The first app for reading books on a phone came in July 2008,” Esposito said, offering a reminder of how recently these digital possibilities have evolved. “All this world we’re talking about here is so preciously new. But it’s difficult to imagine turning back the clock.”

Susan Currie Sivek, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Mass Communication at Linfield College. Her research focuses on magazines and media communities. She also blogs at sivekmedia.com, and is the magazine correspondent for MediaShift.

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MediaShift explains how traditional media such as newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, music and movies are changing with digital disruption and adapting their business models for a more mobile, networked world.